Hi, I'm bmann, and I'm interested in moving the goal posts

Hello, I'm Boris Mann @bmann, and I'm #introduceyourself'ing myself :)

I'm glad that I was able to get a username that is the same as many of the others I have used on the Internet for many years. In fact, I've had my own domain / blog for over 15 years.

I was involved at the beginning of the adoption and spread of open source code, and specifically worked a lot on Drupal, a CMS/community platform that is still widely used today. It was very interesting to watch and help grow all the new things that were happening at the time. Even things like the concept of tagging was new at the time (and we're still fighting the tags-with-spaces vs. no-spaces-in-tags war!). Those of us interested in tools used the tools themselves to communicate with each other, and that itself was a filter. You had to setup a blog, figure out RSS and newsreaders, and then use blogging and RSS to communicate, respond, document, and learn.

I'm feeling the same way about decentralized systems. I'm interested in seeing if we can get people experimenting and kicking the tires on these new systems like Steemit. We're not going to learn, as individuals and as a community, unless we have all sorts of different people and use cases being represented.

At the same time, that "interest barrier" means we will at least have people that have some level of interest in figuring out the tools, and then figuring out the (evolving) community norms of these systems. After all, all of this stuff is "made of people" at the end of the day.

I wrote about moving the goal posts to decentralized publishing systems in response to edtech guy Allan Levine being grumpy about people using Medium, and also inspired by Albert Wenger's post on looking to move off Tumblr ^1.

If I'm going to force myself to move the goal posts, then directly committing to experimenting and exploring and learning from Steemit and the Steemit community is something I'm going to need to do.

I do have some specific questions and am looking for feedback on a few things:

• I noticed @ntomaino's post was some commentary and then a link to Albert's post. Does the community prefer original content, commentary + a link, or a mix?
• I write longer pieces on Medium. Should I cross post the full content, or should I post an intro / overview and a link to the full piece?
• What are some Steemit community norms that I should know about? Any specific tags I should know about like the #introduceyourself one? (I'm looking for a #featurerequest tag, for instance)

Thanks for reading. I'm brand new here, so I'll do some more exploring, and do some more posts to see what is acceptable and interesting.

P.S. I love Markdown. I'd love footnote support!

P.P.S. As part of submitting, I got a message that I was using 8 tags. I guess tags in the body are counted as well as meta-data tags?

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Footnote 1: Albert is a VC with Union Square Ventures, and @ntomaino posted about an earlier article of his